A Legacy of Spies: why John le Carré's 25th novel is set to be the literary event of the autumn

On September 7, John le Carré, now 85, publishes his 25th novel, A Legacy of Spies. His fame has never been greater and the novel, hugely awaited, will be the literary event of the autumn.

On publication day, the great man is making a rare public appearance at the Royal Festival Hall for An Evening With George Smiley, hosted by Jon Snow, and relayed to cinemas across the country.

The novel is under the tightest of embargoes but it has already been reported that it is narrated by Peter Guillam, George Smiley’s sidekick. He is summoned out of retirement in France for an inquiry in London into an operation that took place in East Germany, in the early 1960s, that resulted in the murder of a close colleague and an innocent girl.

The big tease here must be: will le Carré’s greatest creation, George Smiley himself, actually appear rather than merely be recollected? He was last seen in The Secret Pilgrim of 1990, a collection of stories loosely organised around him addressing a graduation dinner at a spy’s training course. At the time, le Carré said this would be Smiley’s last bow. We shall see. The temptation to revive poor old George, however antique he may now be, must have been hard to resist for le Carré.

But just how good is le Carré at his best? He has distinguished fans. Philip Roth famously hailed A Perfect Spy as “the best English novel since the war”. Ian McEwan says he’s in the first rank, “perhaps the most significant novelist of the second half of the 20th century in Britain”.

Others, notoriously Salman Rushdie, who published a sceptical review of The Russia House in 1989, have been less persuaded. Le Carré does not write “serious literature”, Rushdie maintained then.

Doubts about the literary value of his work, because it is genre fiction, must have evaporated now. Years ago, le Carré told an interviewer that he would never stop writing spy stories, because “as with love stories, the possibilities are limitless. That’s because, in our society, in the way we are, most of us live in a condition of secrecy: secret desires, secret appetites, secret hatreds, and a relationship with the institutions which is extremely intense and uncomfortable. These are, to me, a part of the ordinary human condition. So I don’t think I’m writing about abnormal things.” We can all accept that.

No: the reason that le Carré is not a serious novelist lies elsewhere. It’s his treatment, in his fiction, of women — as utterly preposterous, in its own way, as PG Wodehouse’s. Rushdie also complained that le Carré could not create convincing female characters but it’s a little worse than that. His heroines are mirages, fantasies, inappropriately lascivious droolings — and this aspect of his writing has only become more pronounced the older he has got.

Curiously, Adam Sisman’s fine biography of le Carré, published a couple of years ago, revealed that le Carré’s first wife Ann “told him frequently that he knew nothing of women” and that the poverty of the female characters in his books showed his ignorance. They divorced — and he gave her name to Smiley’s tormenting spouse.

Sisman does his best to defend his subject from this charge, even while acknowledging that in his novels women are “objects of desire, invariably beautiful and almost always unattainable”. “If many of le Carré’s women are viewed from afar, that is how his men see them,” he says, rather a circular argument, before throwing up his hands and asserting that at least “the women in le Carré’s novels are more complex and convincing than the ‘love interest’ of the James Bond novels”, appealing to, perhaps, the lowest bar ever set in fiction.

Le Carré’s descriptions of his heroines — all either mysteriously foreign or carelessly aristocratic — are almost too embarrassing to quote but here goes. Where to start?

In The Secret Pilgrim, on his first mission, the narrator Ned has an affair with Bella, the girlfriend of his target, “22 and going on 18... her face was peasant and Slav and naturally happy”. “I pictured her liquid body in different poses,” says Ned, before posing it himself , the light “making a perfect statue of her body, gilding her fleece”, with “her secret garden open to my face as she transports me to places I have never imagined”. Cor! Bella’s mind is less studied than her physique. Like many of le Carré’s women, she is awarded one super-soulful line to deliver, as the couple walk through a cemetery. “‘Everybody is dead,’ she whispered excitedly. ‘But we are alive.’” Up to a point.

Or there’s Gail in Our Kind of Traitor (2010). “Nature had provided Gail with long, shapely legs and arms, high, small breasts, a lissom body, English skin, fine gold hair and a smile to light the gloomiest corners of life.” Heck!

Or in Single & Single (1999), there’s the English girl of whom it is said, “he could imagine her riding horses and climbing glens and looking like an advertisement for rainwear while she fly-fished for salmon”. Or passionate Georgian gangster’s moll, Zoya, who writes to the hero: “Oliver, you have a pure heart. Unfortunately, you are pretending everything. Therefore you are nothing. I love you. Zoya.”

But really why look anywhere else than The Night Manager (1993) after that glorious TV series in which the heroine, Jed, was so wonderfully played by that fabulous giraffe, Elizabeth Debicki. Le Carré’s descriptions of this creature are, to put it mildly, loving. “She had a jewelled brilliance and a kind of dressed nakedness,” our hero Jonathan notices at once. “It was the vague air of shambles, the raggedy smile and unselfconscious carriage, that appointed her an instant citizen of Paradise.” Carriage! But then he muses, she must have taken a special course in “how to do that with your hips when you walk”.

Soon, poor Jonathan can hardly bear to look at her. “Her long legs are baby-pink from the bath, her chestnut hair is brushed out like a good girl’s over her shoulders… Jonathan is nearly ill with desire… Whore! screams a voice inside Jonathan. Tramp! Angel!” Some confusion there, then.

The source of such confusion in le Carré’s own life is clear enough. When he was just five years old, his mother, Olive, walked out on her family and he did not see her again until he was 21, “sixteen hugless years” later. “We were frozen children, & will always remain so,” le Carré wrote to his brother.

The hero of The Naive and Sentimental Lover (1971) is similarly abandoned as a small boy and he laments: “I had no female reference, no one to make women human.” Sisman suggests that the incomprehensible behaviour of Smiley’s aristocratic, faithless wife, Lady Ann — she even manages to knock off the great traitor, Bill Haydon, on Karla’s orders from Moscow — represents “the essential unknowableness of women” to Smiley and le Carré.

Le Carré has owned that he finds writing about women difficult. “Whenever I start to write a female character, Olive always seems to get in the way.” That would be a problem, for he admits in The Pigeon Tunnel, his anecdotal memoirs published last year: “I can’t describe Olive well. As a child, I didn’t know her, and as an adult I didn’t understand her.”

Sisman deals with le Carré’s own love life tactfully, including the “six months’ madness” after the end of his first marriage when he slept with any woman who would have him, and the fact that his “restless, self-destructive search for love” continued to lead him into “impulsive, driven, short-lived affairs”, none of which, Sisman reports, has threatened the stability of his second marriage. Once, complaining about British reviewers in an interview, le Carré observed “at least abroad, if one had a bad review, there would be the satisfaction of knowing that in 99 out of 100 cases you had never met the man, never slept with his wife, and the animus was directed at your work.” Lor!

None of this matters. That the women in his books are all unreal does matter, however, in evaluating them as literature. Will there be another preposterously romantic dalliance with exotic totty at the heart of A Legacy of Spies? A secret, for now. Anyway, what better perhaps than to be so completely desired and so little known?